Celebrating Life and Liberation
With Every Grateful Bone in My Body!
Today is my birthday and though I know it’s just another day of the year for most, this year holds significance for me. As I sit here, reflecting on another trip around the sun I feel grateful and blessed to be alive today. I absolutely mean that with every grateful bone in my body.
Imagine, living an entire life up until a certain point well into your adult years, and finding out that the journey has navigated you away from and closer to your true self simultaneously. It’s amazing how throughout the years and with all of my wisdom and experience I’m finally coming to a new place in my life unlike anywhere I’ve been before. A place of peace and happiness is where I am right now in this moment. When I think about the first half of my life it was so riddled with trauma, pain, and abuse. Other people caused some but mostly harm I caused myself. I often wondered what the point or purpose of my whole life was.
You can read more about my journey in my previous posts of My Ancestors Raised Me Pt 1 & 2
Lately, I’ve been having some pretty phenomenal experiences in my life and these peaceful moments weren’t just handed to me, but I recognize today that my journey led me here.
As a child I was always an inquisitive kid, constantly questioning things and if it didn’t make sense, I was gonna formulate my own understanding one way or another. I can recall a pivotal point in my life at the age of seven years old. I was young and like most children, I was extremely impressionable. I grew up in a very strict religious household we didn’t classify as Christian, but there was a lot of Bible, a lot of indoctrination, and a lot of guilt and shame. At least that’s how I perceived it. Especially as a young black child who didn’t go to traditional church like my peers attended, and I didn’t share their theological belief systems or even really understand them. I often felt persecuted, sometimes intentionally, but sometimes those people had no clue what they were doing.
So, I’m seven years old and I’m sitting in another freaking Bible study bored to tears. There was so much religious indoctrination being forced on me, and I was always made to feel guilty if I didn’t blindly oblige by somebody else’s faith-based system. I couldn’t dare speak up about not wanting to be there for another one of these sessions.
This one particular day, I decided to participate and ask a question, while they were speaking recklessly about the spirit and spewing nonsense from their tongues, in a matter-of-fact, tone. My little young self decided to ask a loaded question “What happens when the spirit dies?” The answer I received shook me to the core of my being. My mom said to me ‘Nothing! We go back to the dirt when we die.” Now even my little self with limited time on this planet knew that there was something fundamentally flawed about this answer. After she answered, she commenced to make me feel like an unbeliever, because I questioned something she claimed was true. She seemed so irritated and unprepared to answer. From that moment forward, I made a conscious decision to not believe in what they were believing in.
The years went by and I continued to do my time in a spiritual penitentiary as I refer to participating in a religion that I felt disdain and disbelief for. I made the loaded decision, I would never get baptized and that was my vow to myself. I would also never blindly follow anyone else’s spiritual path. I would seek to find the answers that made sense to me.
I was often persecuted by the other kids in school for not being normal, I didn’t understand the predominant Christian faith that they were being raised in, and I wasn’t allowed to openly express the the way that I truly felt about being brought up religiously, so I was persecuted inside of that religion for not choosing their path. The older I got the majority of my friends, decided to get baptized. Their parents seemed so proud of them, for making the most important decision of their lives to dedicate their life and soul to God the same way that their parents had chosen and taught them to do. As for me, I refused to be anybody’s religious puppet. I didn’t care if it did get me praise for a day. I was going to stay true to myself.
From the age of 3 loved to sing, and it remains some of my best memories during dark times. Singing or reading made me happy and gave me peace. As I got older I was always so impressed by the choir of black churches. In high school, I often participated in extracurricular activities that involved music. Music was my passion and when it came to singing some gospel tune, I was always excited to do so, but there was always this fear of, admittedly explaining that I wasn’t familiar with the song and I had never heard this song before. Oh my God! The looks on the faces of these African American teenagers who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been raised in the church! How could I have gotten to that age and not at least heard songs like His Eye is On a Sparrow? I felt even more separated at those times, like a heathen but when I had to sing it, I did it justice, but I knew best to stay in my lane with secular R&B and Neo soul music.
When I speak of these experiences, I speak delicately so as not to trash religious folk's way of believing. It’s simply a belief I never understood and never really experienced, until later in life and I’m grateful that I didn’t.
By the time I graduated, I had successfully navigated the childhood remaining unbaptized and spiritually curious. I was free to express myself or not in whatever manner I chose. By the time I reached my early twenties before age 25, life had spiraled into what seemed at the time into the abyss of hell and I was plummeting fast. I had a lot of shit going on, but I also still have that seeker's spirit. I remember the first time I was introduced to meditation. I had a therapist that suggested it, little did I know, that was going to send me on a journey beyond my wildest dreams.
Meditation gave me so much peace and took me to other worlds where I could forget about the past and the future and just simply be. Up to that point I had never consciously experienced that. I chased that feeling like a dog chasing his favorite toy. I began to explore so many possibilities that led me toward myself. I jumped headfirst into the studies of spirituality. I went from meditation to crystals to metaphysics. I was doing so many things at the same time in the beginning. Eventually, I balanced out and started being led into many different spiritual practices and exploring the origins of particular paths. I loved how each one allowed me the spiritual freedom to choose what resonated with me. I studied so many books, went to a ton of workshops, retreats, weekend events, and eventually landed into a profession in the healing sector as a massage therapist.
This catapulted me on a healing journey that started long before I learned about Healing modalities. I now started practicing Yoga and not just vinyasa Yoga but all types of Yoga. Hatha, Pranayama, Nidra, Tantra, etc… Tantra led me to Qigong, Qigong led me to traditional African spirituality and that led me to what my ancestors were doing before Christianity... These experiences saved my life bit by bit and put the broken pieces of me back together and I was broken in a million places. I continued on this journey from that chance happening of getting to experience meditation for the first time, but I think it started long before that. I believe that every soul is on a journey and there are many ways to be distracted by the mundane duties of living in today’s society of capitalism, it is so easy to get caught up in the physicality of it all and forget about the spirituality all around us. With all this healing going on, I had moments where I was pulled away chasing money, chasing men, chasing after other people's ideals, all to find myself.
The answers were always inside me, and the journey hasn’t ended. It’s just beginning. With each spiritual discovery, there was more discovery about who I am and what peace and happiness truly is. I had so much healing to do, to undo all of the programs that were placed in me. The journey continues and just recently I’ve found a place of soul satisfaction and I feel like I’m moving forward to the other half of spiritual understanding and discovery. None of these experiences were in vain because I get to practice all of them to some degree every day and I am grateful for the journey with every grateful bone in my body. After all, for me, this has become a way of life and I wouldn’t choose any other life.
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